Face-to-face or in-person interactions among groups of individuals allow each individual to observe the behavior, mood, expressions, tone and the like of the other individuals in the group not discernable from voice interaction alone. The human experience of direct interaction is always preferable to interaction at a distance that limits communications.
Additionally, group interaction facilitates relationship building by the creation of shared experiences. Traditionally, group interaction that builds relationships within the group was restricted to face-to-face meetings of the group. Of course, groups have long been able to meet and interact when separated physically using telephony technology. More recently, group meetings involving participants at remote locations have been enhanced with the addition of live video feeds of the participants. Both personal computers (PCs) and personal digital assistants (PDAs) are now commonly equipped with both microphones and video cameras that provide the basic resources for creating a shared multimedia session among a group of individuals with PCs and/or smart phones. These devices rely on Internet-based communication protocols such as “Voice over IP” (VoIP).
Meanwhile, conventional agent support systems continue to provide technical support for users of these rapidly evolving multimedia communications environments. Managing agent resources outside of the environment of the multimedia communications environment makes for inefficiencies and possibly even requests for assistance that are ignored.